Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

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CreditCreditJohn Gall

By Daniel Brook

July 7, 2017

HOW TO KILL A CITY Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the NeighborhoodBy Peter Moskowitz 248 pp. Nation Books, $26.99.

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“The coffee shop is the tip of the iceberg,” Moskowitz writes in this exacting look at gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York, exposing how large institutions — governments, businesses, foundations — influence street-level processes that might appear as organic as the coffee shop’s dark roast. In nations that fiscally support their cities (including, once upon a time, our own), municipalities develop low- and moderate-income neighborhoods for their citizens. Stripped of such support, cities scramble to prop up their tax bases by luring wealthy residents with shiny, bland streetscapes.

Moskowitz, a journalist, has seen this firsthand. He grew up in a Greenwich Village whose nonconformist edge got sanded off just when his gay teenage self needed it most. But the scowls Moskowitz gives his parents’ well-heeled neighbors echo those he draws as a gentrifier in the parts of Brooklyn where he relocates.

While moving nimbly from neighborhood observations to broad national and international contexts, Moskowitz occasionally stumbles into unexamined platitudes. “Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation,” he says of Michigan millennials moving from lily-white suburbs to America’s blackest city, a conclusion that ignores the complicated disjunction between individual and institutional racism. Still, more often than not, “How to Kill a City” elucidates the complex interplay between the forces we control and those that control us.

The co-authors of “Gentrifier” take a daring tack: Professors all, they break the third wall of social science to admit their interest is not purely academic. Schlichtman, Patch and Hill study gentrification, they confess, because they are gentrifiers themselves. And they believe that by sharing their experiences, they can help make sociological sense of this fraught topic.

In a deregulated free market, they ask, what power do we individually wield? Living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Hill prides himself on the rapport he has with neighbors in the local barbershops and basketball courts even as his middle-class salary undoubtedly raises their rents. In San Diego, meanwhile, Schlichtman is advised to buy a rooming house, evict the tenants and convert it to a single-family home. He is morally outraged yet knows he cannot halt gentrification: “Somebody would likely buy that house and directly displace those residents,” he concludes, but not him. Even in New York, where he bunks with his Caribbean-American in-laws in Brooklyn, Schlichtman still fears he’s spurring gentrification. Though not directly participating in the real estate market, just walking the streets as a white man signals to others that the neighborhood is ripe for investment.

The authors urge their fellow gentrifiers to unite with older residents in a fight for affordable housing once they move in. This, they argue, is the only way to square the irony that “many progressive activists and academics against gentrification are actually gentrifiers themselves.”

CITY ON THE VERGEAtlanta and the Fight for America’s Urban FutureBy Mark PendergrastIllustrated. 327 pp. Basic Books, $30.

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Studying architecture abroad in the 1990s, Ryan Gravel came to the conclusion of many an American in Paris: Urban life is better sans automobile. Upon his return to Atlanta, he drew up a plan to turn that sprawling region, where most streets don’t even have sidewalks, into something navigable by foot and light rail. Gravel’s master’s thesis proposed converting a decommissioned 22-mile rail loop around the city center into a streetcar line to get people out of their cars and link the city’s largely segregated neighborhoods.

Most architecture theses gather dust, but not Gravel’s. His optimistic New South hometown — a city that, in the words of one early-20th-century observer, “struts before the world as the liberal gateway” — took up the project and branded it the BeltLine. With philanthropists’ backing, pedestrian and bicycle paths were added and over a billion dollars in private real estate funding poured in to develop properties along the route.

But as Pendergrast, an Atlanta native who now lives in Vermont, finds in his exhaustive reporting, this hopeful tale does not necessarily have a happy ending. While private development has boomed, it remains unclear when, if ever, the streetcar loop will be built. Last fall, Gravel himself resigned from the BeltLine board to protest the lack of affordable housing being constructed with the project. Given Atlanta’s long history of fake-it-till-you-make-it boosterism, it’s unclear whether the BeltLine will be an urban inflection point or just the city’s latest “top-down ‘one big project’ trap.”

MAKING RENT IN BED-STUYA Memoir of Trying to Make It in New York CityBy Brandon Harris307 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99.

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In a searing debut memoir, Harris, the scion of a once-prosperous African-American Cincinnati family, moves to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn chasing indie filmmaker dreams. Living in a neighborhood with deep black roots while frequently finding himself the only nonwhite face at rooftop hipster parties, an unmoored Harris begins to mull just who his people are. When his first feature film (“Redlegs”) opens to critical acclaim but commercial failure, the young filmmaker ends up supporting his kale and duck breast habit with food stamps, not knowing “what my class was anymore.” No such confusion attends his race. No matter how light his skin or how green his eyes, America regularly reminds him of his second-class status.

As the “color-coded class war” of gentrification drags on, “once-interesting conversations” turn to real estate, and the dream of making art in the city becomes increasingly untenable. While Harris’s perpetually unemployed rich white roommate inhabits a world where parents buy their ne’er-do-well children entire buildings to manage, “‘indie film is a rich kids’ game,’ a rich kid had told me.” For the filmmakers of his generation, “selling out had simply become a way of life.”

Thankfully, memoirs have lower overhead than movies, so we still have some access to Harris’s unbribed soul. With its stinging truths and inventive language, “Making Rent in Bed-Stuy” stands as a monument to what is lost when New York’s low-rent underdog outer borough becomes just another county of kings.

Daniel Brook is the author of “A History of Future Cities” and “The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.”